'
Radio host Don Imus arrives at his Manhattan residence Friday, April 13, 2007 in New York. Rutgers women's basketball coach C. Vivian Stringer said Friday the team had accepted radio host Don Imus' apology. She said he deserves a chance to move on but hopes the furor his racist and sexist insult caused will be a catalyst for change. (AP Photo/David Karp)

NEW YORK — Fighting in vain to keep his job, radio host Don Imus claimed that rappers routinely "defame and demean black women" and call them "worse names than I ever did."
That's an argument many people made as the Imus fallout intensified, culminating with his firing Thursday for labeling the Rutgers women's basketball team "nappy-headed hos." Now that Imus has been silenced (for the moment), some critics are moving down the radio dial to take on hip-hop, boosting the growing movement against harmful themes in rap.
"We all know where the real battleground is," wrote Kansas City Star columnist Jason Whitlock. "We know that the gangsta rappers and their followers in the athletic world have far bigger platforms to negatively define us than some old white man with a bad radio show."